More of this!
Please let this be the last week!
Incise
We don’t use
incise much these days, although incisor and incision are still popular. Incision
actually predates incise by two hundred years, as incise showed up in the mid sixteenth century—incisor on the other
hand showed up in the seventeenth century. Incise and incisor come from the
French inciser, which is from the Old French
enciser and incision is from the Old
French incision. All are from classical Latin, from incisus (cut)
and incisionem, respectively, and
both those words come from the verb incidere,
to cut. The in- means into here and -cidere, as we discussed last week, comes from the Latin caedere, to cut or hack.
Yeah, I’d prefer a doctor making a “cut” into me rather than a “hack”.
Exercise
One of my least
favorite activities, exercise showed up in the mid fourteenth century from the Old French exercice and
classical Latin exercitium, the noun
form of exercise. Its verb
form is exercere, to exercise obviously, which is a mix of the prefix ex-, off,
and arcere, to keep away, prevent, or
coerce, and is from the Proto Indo European ark-, hold, contain, or guard, the
origin word for arcane.
So exercise isn’t related to the other -cise words. But more importantly it’s
related to a word for coerce and I think that’s just extremely apt.
Exorcise
This should be a
fun one. Maybe more appropriate for Halloween? Exorcise first showed up in the
fifteenth century from the Old
French exorciser and Late Latin exorcizare. That word was actually take
from Greek, where the word is exorkizein,
which meant banish evil spirits… or, you know, exorcise.
So this one isn’t related to the -cise words either? And it use to be spelled “exorcize”,
but may have changed to an S because of the influence of exercise. No, I can’t
believe it either.
Sources
So, exorcise is a misspelling that got codified by enough mistakes? Weirder things have happened.
ReplyDeleteExorcise sounds just convoluted enough to need its own exorcism.
ReplyDeleteI got nothing today...
ReplyDeleteI think my brain has been exorcised.
I kind of like that the word exercise and the word coerce are related. Makes sense...
ReplyDelete